Black Forest: Kingdoms Fall (7 page)

Rapunzel did not know the words. At the time, she did not know the word 'word.' Each time her mother brought her a book, she would simply stare at the
startling images - a beast with fire, breathing it down upon a man who held a piece of metal helplessly against it, or maidens being squirreled away by a
monster, lined up in a dark and frightening dungeon for a later meal - and she would understand how much her mother loved her to keep her from such things.

Then, one night, Rapunzel had a most incredible dream. She dreamt she was standing at the window, and that the books, rising from their piles on the floor,
closed in at her. Closer and closer they came until she felt the open air at her back and had no place left to go.

Feeling the cold stone beneath her palms, Rapunzel screamed as a single book tumbled to the window ledge beside her, the spine cracking backward, pages
rustling in the wind. When she looked down, the words she saw made sense, and Rapunzel woke with a start.

The book was one she recognized, but that she liked least, for in the places of creatures and people and vast waters with no borders, there were only
things Rapunzel already knew, like the sky and the clouds and the trees, with dots and lines and dashes beside them.

Not quite awake, the tower was not quite lighted for the day, but Rapunzel had stumbled from her bed, finding the book at the bottom of a large stack.

When she pulled back the cover, nothing made sense. The words were the same as in her dream, but she had no more comprehension of them than she had before.
Staring at the pages until her back began to ache from hunching, she at last began to notice how the words aligned with the pictures - the letters T-R-E-E
pointing to the object she knew as a tree, W-A-T-E-R pointing to what she knew as water - and Rapunzel began to understand the connections between them,
how some of the words sounded the same in some places and not in others.

With all the time in the world to study, she soon figured out the pattern, and, not long after that, she discovered she could read anything, even if she
did not always understand it. She knew what a dragon looked like, a palace, a cloak, a horse, for those things always seemed to fill the pictures. There
were other words, though, for which there were no images, like "hope" and "destiny" and "desire," that she understood only somewhat, but would not dare ask
her mother to explain.

Once Rapunzel learned the words, she went back through every book in the tower, discovering that, in the stories with the dragons that breathed fire and
the trolls and the cheats and the killers, there were other kinds of creatures too, and people who were not all bad, knights and priestesses and mothers
who stayed with their children. There were people who were brave, who did wonderful things, who loved so deeply they risked everything, and Rapunzel wanted
to know what else existed in the worlds that she read about.

"Will I ever leave here?" she asked her mother one day.

"You have seen what is in the world," her mother replied, pointing a crooked old finger at the books. "Why would you want to be a part of that misery?"

Rapunzel did not know if her mother was lying, or if she could not read the books herself, if she saw only the dangers in the pictures, not the beautiful
things in the words.

"Are there not other people in the world like you?" she asked, knowing she must be careful in her questions, that if her mother knew they made her long for
something else, she would take the books away, just as she had brought them to pacify her.

"Like me?" Her mother appeared strangely uneasy at the question.

"Good people," Rapunzel smiled. "Those who love their daughters as you do."

It was always worrying, talking to her mother, having to use such caution to use only the words she was certain her mother had taught her and not ones she
had learned from the texts.

"No others have protected their daughters as I have," her mother would say, and Rapunzel hid her understanding behind a half-hearted smile.

On that point, she believed her mother sincere, having come to understand from the books that no mothers could protect their daughters as her mother had,
by hiding them away in a doorless tower that reached far into the trees and could not be escaped.

Her mother had many times told her that an old lady with an ugly countenance could not expect much from the world, yet there were always books and fresh
cakes and new fabric for clothes and the tower, which she knew her mother had erected herself. That is how she knew her mother was a sorceress, who could
be either good or evil, but rarely acted on the intentions she said.

"There must be some worth meeting," Rapunzel would gently argue.

"There are not," her mother would declare, but Rapunzel knew it was untrue. For, if there were no people who loved and sacrificed and dared, who wrote of
such people?

"Will I ever see anything else?" Rapunzel questioned at last.

It became her only question. Every time her mother came to visit, she would ask, and every time her mother's answer was the same.

"When you are older," she would say.

It would always be the answer, Rapunzel realized, until her mother one day grew so old she simply stopped coming, or the tower fell, or she, herself,
failed one morning to wake from sleep.

With the knowledge of all she would never see, the days in the tower stretched longer, and the song Rapunzel sang turned melancholy, filling the air around
the tower with a sadness that quieted the birds in their joy, but that no one else would ever hear.

She would see another place, she knew, but it would not be the world outside the tower. The world in which she lived would always be only words and
pictures on pages. For her, there would be nothing more until she reached the world beyond it, as so many had before her, only in death.

C
inderella was never meant to be a thief. Even when learning the trade might have made escaping her life with her stepmother and stepsisters possible, she
could not separate the skill from the emotional toll. It was not so much the stealing itself, but the uncertainty in it. Appearance was deceiving, she
knew, one could never truly know what another had, and the idea of taking from anyone who had less than the fractured bricks of the fireplace on which she
slept had stayed her hands and kept her a prisoner in her own home.

The bountiful food of the harem gone, though, Cinderella quickly discovered there was nothing free in the kingdom of Naxos. Everything was done on trade,
and she had nothing to give. At least, nothing she was willing to give up. Akasha had given her a better understanding of the looks on the faces of the men
she crossed paths with in the streets, so every apple held up from a cart or every fish offered on bread looked like more like bait than benevolence.

Hiding the first night, alongside dirty women and children who also knew better than to wander alone in the darkness, the foreign arid air settled on top
of her, drying her mouth and her chest, making it hard to draw breath, but, despite the oppressive heat, Cinderella shivered the night through at the type
of deal she would be forced to make if she did not figure out how to care for herself in a foreign kingdom. All her life, she wanted nothing more than to
flee. Amongst the darkest recesses and squalor of a new land, though, she understood suffering had its perks when it took place indoors and there was
enough sustenance to keep her well enough to work. Much like Akasha's harem. No part of Cinderella longed to return to the harem or to her father's
household, but nearly every part of her longed for their comforts.

She would not survive in the village. She knew by the second day when the sun reached its peak again, hotter than she had ever known, even when she had
spent entire days hauling water from the well to refill the supply for her household. The sun had burned her skin then, but it was nothing like the burn of
the Naxos sun, which seemed to sink right through her out-of-place gown and set her aflame.

So, Cinderella began to look beyond the walls.

The villagers talked about them, the woods outside of town. They were a treacherous place, they warned, filled with things so dangerous, many brave men
perished from sheer fright. There was no need to venture into them. They would do so at autumn harvest, a man told her, once Cinderella found the daring to
approach a stranger in the marketplace. Another man added that a dozen men had gone missing when they harvested in early summer. With enough food stores to
get them through two cycles of the moon, there was no cause to risk another venture before the supply ran low again.

So, although, during the day, the gates of the kingdom were left wide, they offered only the illusion of true freedom, for no one ever passed through them.

Not unfamiliar with their fears, Cinderella listened with the ear of one who had heard many lies in her lifetime. Men went missing, they said, but not one
amongst them could list these men by name. The woods carried unimaginable horrors, they said, but every danger they talked about Cinderella imagined quite
easily, for those same threats lived within the forests of Troyale.

Her kingdom had its specters, phantoms that came out at night and filled the forest with howls and foreboding, but only in darkness, as scared of the day
as the good citizens of the kingdom of Naxos were of the woods even at highest sunlight.

Since they did not think the forest worth walking, Cinderella wondered if their land lacked the fruits of summer, for, in Troyale, she always found the
forest more escape than fright, especially when the warm air and summer rains made it burst with color and flavor. Her stepmother could keep her from the
flowers and berries upon the tables in her home, threatening her with all means of punishment, but she could not stop a girl's indulgence in the forest,
where the sights, scents, food and shelter belonged to everyone equally.

Perhaps free did exist in Naxos after all, but, as in Troyale, only beyond the walls where men feared to tread.

Determined to find out if the woods of Naxos were truly worse than those of her own kingdom, Cinderella sat out on the third morning to find refuge in the
shade and moisture and abundance of the forest, knowing she would have to return to take shelter in the depressing world beneath the buildings of Naxos
when the sun began its retreat.

Once in the woods, she discovered, much to her relief, but not to her surprise, they were without fear, the same rustles and thumps she knew well, nothing
as ominous as the villagers warned, and far more familiar to her than the barren land inside the walls of the city.

While the sights and smells of summer were different than in Troyale, they were just as satisfying. Greens and purples and oranges hung from above and
sprouted at her feet, grown tall from lack of human traffic. Quietly wading through the river of color, Cinderella came upon rabbits and squirrels, bigger
than were common in her home kingdom, with strange black stripes along their backs. The deer in Naxos were also different, taller and broader with dark
strips of hair upon their heads, like the manes of horses.

For a while, she watched the creatures of the forest, and learned from them what she could and could not eat. Picking the safe pods from the trees, she
found some so sour her neck crinkled in protest as they hit her tongue, and some so sweet they soothed her aching palate. Different, as it seemed
everything was, the fruits of Naxos were diverse, and Cinderella wondered how the villagers lived without them, how they did not crave what they were
missing just beyond the safety of the wall. Abundant and owned by no one, the fruits of the land became hers, and Cinderella ate herself beyond full,
feeling justified by the fact that she did not know with any assurance when she might eat again.

At home, when she wandered deep into the woods, there was always purpose. At the order of her stepmother, she searched for a specific flower thought to
eliminate aging or for food stores for winter, those months when her family was the most gluttonous and also the stingiest, in which Cinderella's own
hunger grew the most gnawing.

No one's tea to fetch, slippers to mend or hair to comb, and nowhere to which she had to return, Cinderella wandered aimlessly through the forest of Naxos,
delighting in each new taste or animal, walking past a grove of trees, through an opening lined with hanging berries, and into a patch of stones, set up in
a bizarre fashion she thought must have some significance. Refusing to let her fear of the coming night overshadow her current freedom, however temporary
it may be, she hopped between them as if they were arranged just for her.

There was danger, though, in slipping into fantasy, Cinderella was reminded when she looked around at last and nothing looked at all familiar. In Troyale,
she knew the trees, how they formed, which grew closest to the village, which grew furthest. Away from her own kingdom, she could not roam without
consequence. The forest around her a maze of foreign flora, Cinderella could not decide which way to turn.

Rushing in one direction, it felt wrong, and so she turned in the other, but that felt wrong too. Glancing upward, she wondered how long the light would
hold, as it occurred to her she could not be more lost. The realization flooding through her, she felt the pang of regret she had not allowed herself since
running from the prince. Perhaps, she had been wrong to flee. Perhaps, she would pay for not obeying the royalty of her land. Perhaps, the prince was her
only hope for salvation.

The uninvited thought pressing in on her, it was accompanied by a song. Darker, more haunting than the forest around her, it had no words, yet Cinderella
understood it perfectly. Resonating within her, it too sounded lost, and Cinderella felt suddenly found.

Drawn deeper into the dense forest, it was as if the notes were visible, floating on the air before her, beckoning her onward. At their call, she forgot
about the setting sun and her hunt for the path back to the walls of the village, at last coming to the tree from which the music sprang. Pushing toward
the sky, the tree matched those around it, but was somehow different, much as the people of Naxos and its customs were to her, similar, yet not quite the
same.